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computer sees new SATA as primary

I have a Dell 8100 Pentium 4, running XP Home. The boot disk is the factory (IBM) IDE drive. I added a second drive (a WD SATA) and a SATA card. All of this works fine. Today I installed a second WD SATA drive (the new 750 GB model) and plugged it into the open SATA connector on the card. When I turned the computer on, it immediately found the new WD drive and said "primary." At that point, it was dead. Obviously, the computer thinks the new drive should be the boot drive. I disconnected the drive and looked for some way to disable the boot path to the drive in the BIOS. I don't see anything to change. The boot sequence is floppy, optical disk, hard disk.

I also tried to start the computer with a boot CD in place (Ultimate Boot CD), but it still stopped when it identified the new drive and would not boot from the CD.

How can I get the computer to boot from the usual old drive, so that I can format and use the new one?

Thank you. It is worth checking, but I am 99% sure the drive is set to master. It is the boot drive that arrived from Dell as the only HD. I doubt that they would have set it to slave. The computer has an optical drive on the primary, which should be set to slave.

Arg! I have no idea what the card is. I put it in a rather long time ago. It is for the first generation of SATA drives and supports two. Since the new drive uses the latest SATA technology, it that may be a problem, but I hoped it would be backwards compatable. Maybe the porblem is not simply that the computer thinks it should boot from the new drive?

Unfortunately, the drive was an OEM and arrived with no jumpers. I don't have a jumper, so all pins are open.

I gave up and removed the drive. I then installed the drive in a computer that has an Asus board and A64/3400 processor. The motherboard has connections for 4 SATA drives. This computer boots with the WD7500 connected, but the drive is not detected. Linux cannot see the drive. I booted with Partition Magic; the software found the old IDE drives, but not the WD7500. I then booted with the Ultimate Boot CD. From there I ran the latest WD drive software that was present. The WD software reported that no WD drives were present.

My present guess is that the drive is too new for my equipment. Any ideas for what to do now?

If the issue is needing a compatibility jumper for the WD Sata, you ought to be able to get one from a local shop or a friendly local hobbyist. The drive itself must be okay since your new Sata card sees it. The Asus might need the compatibility jumper to see it. I'm assuming the Asus is already using a Sata drive and Sata is enabled in its bios.

If the issue is needing a compatibility jumper for the WD Sata, you ought to be able to get one from a local shop or a friendly local hobbyist. The drive itself must be okay since your new Sata card sees it. The Asus might need the compatibility jumper to see it. I'm assuming the Asus is already using a Sata drive and Sata is enabled in its bios.

I found some old jumpers. The really old ones were too small. The only other one I could find was on a discarded tape drive. It went on, but may not be tight enough to make contact. I may have to drive 15 miles and try to buy one.

My Asus manual shows 3 jumper settings: clear RAM, USB wake-up, and keyboard power. The board I have is A8V-XE. Those jumper settings don't seem to apply to the drives.

The Asus had two parallel IDE drives and two optical drives, no SATA drives, until today. I have the WD plugged into the first (red) SATA socket (primary).

I downloaded the WD software that has some drive tools on it. It boots from a floppy. When I boot with it, the software cannot find the new drive, but finds the two old drives.

Unfortunately, the WD explanation for the jumper settings doesn't make sense to me. I have written to WD's help center, but they have not given any human response for over a day. They sent links to instructions that have nothing to do with the problem.

I have also looked at the BIOS and don't see anything that looks like an obvious problem, but I am not knowledgable enough to figure this out in the first place.

Many thanks for all of the suggestions. After several additional tries yesterday, I tried again this morning, with the jumper on pins 5-6. When I ran WD Data Lifeguard Tools, it saw the new disk! After only a couple of minutes, it said the thing was ready to go as one partition (full size) NTFS. I managed to open the drive with Ubuntu and saw the formatted size at 698GB.

I still don't know if I used the correct jumper pair, but at least the drive seems to be alive and working.